IIW2006: Wednesday Sessions

Kaliya started the day with a call for anyone else who wanted to
create new sessions and then did a "spectrogram." She put a long
piece of tape on the floor and asked questions where people arrayed
themselves along the spectrum represented by the tape. She
interviewed people at spots on the tape. A good way to get a feel
for how the group is thinking about some things.

I did my session on reputation and showed off the reputation system
we built in my 601 class last semester. Generally well received and
good comments.

Which bring us to reputation. Reputation can be used for
collaborative filtering, collaborative sanctioning, and threshold
maintenance. Negative reputation can be problematic. Altruistic
punishment is a way of getting around that.

Reputation changes over time. Reputation accumulates. Timestamps on
transaction are important. Disassociating from past choices is
important. Who's not my friend any more?

Chris has been looking at attack categories for reputation.

Shilling attacks (using a shill) can add to a reputation with no
substance, yielding high positive ratings. Called "astroturf" in some
circles--fake grassroots.

Spamming attacks can lead to excess bad results. Also called
"griefing."

Whoring (as in "karma whoring" on Slashdot). You do things right
right for a time in order to build up a reputation which you exploit
later. Sell a bunch of cheap books on Amazon and then use the good
reputation to rip someone off on a single large transaction. A
better word for this might be "Stinging."

Collusion (Chris called this "faking") is people working together
to build a false reputation.

There were some great sessions and the workshop seemed to have given
most people some new things to talk about. We're contemplating what
to do for the next workshop in the Fall. We'll be doing a short
event just before DIDW on September 11. THat will be a 6 hour event
and attendees will get a break on DIDW entrance fees.

We also want to do a longer event later in the fall. We've
contemplated doing an event on the East coast in November, but I'm
inclined to stick with the West Coast because of the energy that's
being generated in the events that we've had so far. If you have
ideas, contact me or Kaliya and let us know.